Characters in The Breathing Method

During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out four volumes of Algernon Williams’s poetry (I had three others myself, and had already checked through them); one of these volumes purported to be The Complete Poems of.

I turned the check over to Stevens and I suppose he mailed it. It just so happened that Arlene Hanrahan was a member of Ellen’s Theater Society, and Ellen told me sometime later that Arlene had received an anonymous check for ten thousand four hundred dollars.

There was also a long, narrow room which ran the length of the building and contained two bowling alleys. In those same years I re-read the novels of Edward Gray Seville, and discovered an absolutely stunning poet—the equal of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, perhaps—named Norbert Rosen.

“That’s fair enough. My name is Sandra Stansfield.” And she held her hand out. Rather amazed, I took it and shook it. I’m rather glad Ella Davidson didn’t see me do that. She would have made no comment, but the coffee would have been bitter for the next week.

She turned the covers back with ladylike decorum . . . and then, giggling, kicked them onto the floor with her feet. “Beat me, daddy,” Ellen said, “eight to the bar.” “Oink, oink,” I said, and then we were both laughing. • • • The Thursday before Christmas came.

No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those earlier musings . . . and, my heart told me, every bit as true. • • • I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts and the Reading Library. Met him?

And when the dust cleared, Gerard Tozeman, dazed and deaf, bleeding from his nose, his ears, and the corners of both eyes, his testicles already swelling from the force of the concussion, had come upon Carruthers’s body …

“The woman. You can only tell it is a woman from the hem of the skirt and the shoes. Who is she?” “Her name is Harriet White,” I said, and thought: And hers will be the first face you see when you arrive to deliver your child.

As I sipped it I saw two of those present, George Gregson and Harry Stein (Harry was six years dead on the night Emlyn McCarron told us the story of the Breathing Method), leave the room by a peculiar door that could not have been more than forty-two …

He asked me if I could step up to his office. When I got there I saw that Robert Carden was also there, and Henry Effingham. For one moment I was positive I was about to be accused of some really dreadful act of stupidity or ineptitude.

And there was a sharp, indefinable sense of excitement in the air. Johanssen took only a cursory glance at his Journal and then joined McCarron, Hugh Beagleman, and myself. We sat near the windows, talking of this and that, and finally fell into a passionate—and often hilarious—discussion of pre-war automobiles.

She left. I found myself thinking about her at odd moments over the next month, and— • • • Johanssen interrupted McCarron’s story at this point. They were old friends, and I suppose that gave him the right to ask the question that had surely crossed all our minds.

They lived in Maine. They could have no children of their own. They adopted the child and named him . . . well, John’s good enough, isn’t it? John will do you fellows, won’t it?” He puffed at his pipe but it had gone out again.

The firm sent me to Copenhagen for six weeks that fall, and I returned to discover that John Hanrahan, one of the regular attendees at 249B, had died of cancer. A collection was taken up for his wife, who had been left in unpleasant circumstances.

His shirt was matted with blood and his eyes were bulging from their sockets. “ ‘I’ve got to talk to Joe,’ he said. Joe, you understand, was Joseph Woods, the head of my firm, one of the most influential private-sector lawyers in Washington, and this Senator’s close personal friend.

Here was the stony shore of Brittany on the bony ridge of Lathrop Carruthers’s brow. Here was the Rhine flowing like a blue scar down his left cheek. Here were some of the finest winegrowing provinces in the world bumped and ridged over his chin.

Sleet ticked off streetlights and the roofs of cars; it melted in large, magnifying drops on the taxi’s yellow dome-light. Mrs. Gibbs told me later that the young cab driver was more nervous than her “poor, dear Sandra,” and that was probably a contributing cause to the accident.

Or maybe her supervisor finally decided that her suspicions were no longer just suspicions. “I’ll want to see you in the office on your break,” this woman, a Mrs. Kelly, said coldly. She had previously been quite friendly to Miss Stansfield.

In those same years I re-read the novels of Edward Gray Seville, and discovered an absolutely stunning poet—the equal of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, perhaps—named Norbert Rosen.

That at least explained the comment I had heard on my first visit, the one to the effect that Norman Stett should have saved his story for Christmas. Other questions hovered on my lips, but I saw a reflected caution in Stevens’s eyes.

He asked me if I could step up to his office. When I got there I saw that Robert Carden was also there, and Henry Effingham. For one moment I was positive I was about to be accused of some really dreadful act of stupidity or ineptitude.

In April of that year I saw a new patient, a young woman whom I will call Sandra Stansfield—that name is close enough to what her name really was. This was a young woman, white, who stated her age to be twenty-eight.

Other questions hovered on my lips, but I saw a reflected caution in Stevens’s eyes. It was not a warning that he would not answer my questions; it was, rather, a warning that I should not even ask them. “Was there something else, Mr. Adley?”